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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Mental Illness - social impacts

I really enjoyed this hangout. As with many of our discussions, we were taking on a HUGE topic, and were not able to cover everything about it. I began by recommending the book The Midnight Disease by Alice Weaver Flaherty, in which the author, a neurologist herself, describes having a postpartum psychotic break that caused her to become hypergraphic (not able to stop writing). The book examines mental illness and the building blocks of creativity and the genetic links between them.

We made a brief list of some mental illnesses. Clinical depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder (used to be multiple personality disorder) are just a few. The classifications change all the time. Gender dysphoria was recently removed from the list and is no longer classified as a mental illness.

What is and is not a mental illness is a tricky question. Historically, there have been a lot of cases of putting people in mental hospitals against their will for illegitimate reasons like cultural difference or just wanting to control them. The definitions of mental illness are culturally and politically determined. They do NOT include a range of neurological issues such as attention deficit/hyperactiity disorder or autism.

Mental illnesses can co-occur and even cause each other.

Marginalized groups in society who are oppressed also tend to have higher rates of mental illness like anxiety and depression, caused by the oppression. Unwillingness to trust authority makes a degree of sense when authorities can't be trusted - but standing up for yourself has sometimes been classified as "oppositional defiance" disorder.

In the United States, health insurance is a problem. Often the poor are not able to get treatment for mental illness for economic reasons.

There are also instances of people who don't get treatment because they don't want to admit they have a mental illness. Mental illness is stigmatized in many societies.

The question of mental illness is also complicated by phenomena like gaslighting, where someone tries to make someone believe they are "crazy." This abuse tactic can in fact co-occur with real mental illness that has nothing like the same effect.

We spoke for a few minutes about the tangential topic of perception of reality, and consensus reality. Ideology is folded into this in interesting ways.

We asked what one might do to portray mental illness in fiction, and of course the key was RESEARCH. Read a lot, and seek out first-hand journal accounts if you want to portray any particular condition from the inside. I spoke about how I had used the mental illnesses of obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia to change the portrayal of the villain in my novel. One of the keys, though, was making sure he was contrasted with his father, who is also evil and sane.

Don't fall into the trap of equating violence or evil with mental illness. The mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Try to steer away from the stereotypes of the magical or holy mad person or the evil mad person.

I mentioned This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman, which features a planet where everyone has what we would call "mental illness," but their neurological uniqueness is seen as a potential advantage and they are given jobs that play to this uniqueness. They also make up their faces to indicate to others around them what kind of accommodations they might need.

We also spoke about the show Legion. Legion has different personalities related to different X-men style powers. One of the things that got mentioned was how secondary characters in the show have different perceptions of reality based on the kinds of powers they have, which influence their behavior. A character who can temporarily switch minds with someone else just by touching them will be touch-phobic, for example. Powers influence mental states.

Kate said that "society gaslights the mentall ill via a pop culture worldview." The way that pop culture narratives portray mental illness is often inaccurate, particularly since the internal experience of mental illness is so incredibly variable.

People living in society are dependent on each other for all kinds of life functions. Access to those is controlled by others. Cutting people off, exile, etc. harms people. Solitary confinement is a punishment but causes people to lose their mental health (and our societal choices of whom to imprison have a huge influence on who is vunlerable to this).

When you don't fit in, you can be labeled and excluded.

Thank you to everyone who came to participate. This was an interesting discussion. This week we meet on Wednesday, April 26 at 10am Pacific to speak with guest author Megan O'Keefe about books 2 and 3 in her Scorched Continent series. The link to our first discussion with her, about Steal the Sky, is here.